Behind Auckland's new remand prison is a former FBI man with a castle in Florida and a controversial empire spanning 50 countries, reports GREG ANSLEY.
What links Auckland's new central remand prison and paramilitary units guarding super-secret United States nuclear facilities, shadowy rumours of political corruption and CIA dirty tricks, and allegations of prison brutality in at least three countries?
The answer is George Wackenhut, a former FBI agent whose giant self-named corporation owns Australasian Correctional Management (ACM), the Sydney-based company which in May last year won the contract to run the Auckland prison for the Department of Corrections.
ACM is the subject of an Australian federal inquiry into allegations of the repeated rape of a 12-year-old boy and subsequent cover-up by the management of the Woomera migrant detention centre in the South Australian outback.
ACM runs five other detention centres for Australia's Immigration Department, and remand centres and prisons in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.
Controversy has kept pace with ACM's Australian growth, although criminologists say its problems are not unique to private prisons. One of its main rivals, Corrections Corporation of Australia - another US offshoot - this year had its control of a Victorian women's high-security jail revoked by the state Government.
In 1993, demands for an inquiry into the management of the Arthur Gorrie Remand Centre in Queensland - ACM's first Australian contract - followed a riot and four suicides in its first 18 months.
There have also been unproven allegations of assaults, intimidation and sexual harassment at the ACM-run Fulham Correctional Centre in Victoria, although a state Government report this month concluded that ACM and another private prison operator, Group 4, had begun to improve their management.
Last month, ACM was awarded a further five-year contract, worth $A100 million, to run a prison at Junee, in central NSW.
Australia, Mr Wackenhut said this year, was finally getting it right - it was really starting to punish people the way they should have done all along.
Not surprisingly, Mr Wackenhut is an old-fashioned law-and-order man, a graduate of J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation who at 34 quit to become a private eye, setting up a company called Special Agent Investigators in Miami with three other FBI agents in 1954.
Within four years he had bought out his partners and, through his close association with Florida Governor Claude Kirk and Senator George Smathers - one of President John F. Kennedy's inner circle, fought organised crime and won contracts to guard key federal installations, including nuclear test sites and Cape Canaveral.
He also built up extensive files on suspected communists and liberals covering 2.5 million people - one in 46 Americans - by 1965, and expanded this to more than 4 million in 1966 by buying the private files of Karl Barslaag, formerly of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which persecuted tens of thousands of suspected Reds during the McCarthy era of the early 1950s.
In 1975, with a congressional investigation at his heels, Mr Wackenhut gave the files to the now-defunct anti-communist Church League of America, although retaining rights of access and use. The league had worked closely with anti-communist police units in major US cities.
By this time Mr Wackenhut had gone public, selling 46 per cent of his eponymous corporation, extending into strike-breaking, providing bodyguards, anti-terrorism and a maze of related work, and building himself a moated $US20 million castle at Coral Gables, Florida.
His vast empire employs more than 50,000 people in 50 countries and earns more than $US1 billion a year.
Seven years ago it expanded into Russia, surfing with the wave of crime and corruption that followed the collapse of communism to develop a small, well-armed and high-tech army of bodyguards, security guards, investigators and electronics experts liaising directly with Russian law enforcement agencies.
In the US, Wackenhut Corporation's various divisions embrace security services, bodyguards, private and criminal investigations - including corporate fraud and employee drug use - armoured vehicles, and private prisons.
The corporation protects US embassies abroad, State Department facilities at home, and a large number of America's key strategic installations, including the Alaskan oil pipeline, the Hanford nuclear-waste facility and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Wackenhut's paramilitary special response teams, complete with helicopter support, guard the US Energy Department's Savannah River plutonium plant in South Carolina, the Nevada nuclear weapons test site, and the Oak Ridge nuclear facility in Tennessee.
Oak Ridge, which played a leading role in the birth of the atomic bomb, manufactures and reworks nuclear weapons components and is the main storage depot for military nuclear materials.
Wackenhut's directors have reflected its federal business. They include former chiefs of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defence Intelligence Agency, the Secret Service and the Marine Corps, plus a former Attorney-General and a deputy CIA director.
Not surprisingly, the corporation has been accused of performing dirty tricks on behalf of the CIA, especially since Congress demanded an agency spring-clean in the 1970s, and has attracted an orbit of left-fielders who believe, for example, in its collusion in UFO conspiracies.
Wackenhut has always denied doing CIA work, although in 1992 the US magazine Spy, in a highly detailed and much-quoted investigation, produced evidence suggesting that the corporation had provided security for shipments of chemical weapons ingredients to Iraq.
Other allegations have far greater substance, including strikebreaking, beating anti-nuclear protesters and exposure of corporate and Government whistle-blowers, including George Hamel, a key player in the scandal surrounding the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.
Wackenhut operatives spied on Mr Hamel with wiretaps and stole documents to prevent their release to the Environmental Protection Agency.
In 1984, Wackenhut set up a separate division, Wackenhut Corrections, to exploit the growth of private prisons, going public in 1994, but retaining 55 per cent control.
Wackenhut Corporation and its subsidiaries now operate more than 50 facilities in the US, New Zealand, Australia, Britain, Puerto Rico, South Africa, Canada and Curacao, housing almost 40,000 prisoners.
It has powerful and sometimes dubious friends. Manny Aragon, a New Mexico senator, suddenly dropped his opposition to private prisons and pushed a contract for Wackenhut after accepting a job as a paid lobbyist for ACC and a business associate received a big concreting contract.
The problems facing Wackenhut prisons are legion. In the US, it has faced federal 62 actions for deprivation of prisoners' civil rights in the past two years, last year Florida prison guards protested against alleged corruption amid claims of sexual assault in ACC jails, and two Wackenhut prisons in New Mexico have been plagued by riots and a series of murders.
In Texas, a dozen former guards have been indicted on sex charges, and the company investigated for the diversion of $US700,000 intended for drug rehabilitation programmes.
And in Louisiana, a judge called a Wackenhut jail unsafe, violent and inhumane, and a Justice Department report recorded assaults, abuse and humiliation of juvenile prisoners, including use of gas grenades.
In Britain, the company's Doncaster prison has one of the highest suicide rates in the country.
Now Auckland is part of the Wackenhut family.
Private prisons, public scandals
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